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Comment by antsar | Hacker News Reader

Android would, in my opinion, be impaired if it didn't include Google play, gmail, chrome, and Google Maps.

Android would be "impaired" if it shipped a general-purpose mail client rather than one designed specifically for Gmail?

It would be "impaired" if part of the setup process was to select an app store[0], a browser[1], and a maps app[1]?

That sounds more like "consumer empowerment" than "impairment" to me.

[0] Google Play, F-Droid, Amazon's app store, etc

[1] Just show that category of programs from the aforementioned app store

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More complex setup is a UX quality loss, so, yes, Android would be impaired by your recommendations. (And, on top of that, giving developers less consistency they could rely on on the platform would also be an impairment resulting from that.)

Whether an improved competitive marketplace would result from the changes and yield long-term benefits that offset the cost of those impairments may be a worthwhile debate, but its not a debate you can even have honestly without recognizing the impairments.

It's actually been really nice to remove all the Google apps and find apps with UIs I actually like rather than the Google-branded blinding-in-the-dark stark-white look they're shoving on everyone these days.

The fact that you are able to do that is a strong indicator that even if the apparent claim that "Google is using its position to discourage the inclusion of rival applications" were to reflect Google's actual intent, it's clearly not working very well.

It's really not, because I'm a career IT specialist, with a degree in software development and a ton of experience. For anyone outside of that, Google makes it very scary and very difficult to do.

Google's "openness" is what I refer to as "just enough rope to hang yourself with". They only are open insofar as they know you can't successfully compete with them.

Android already does ship generic apps and let users install their own app stores, browsers, maps, and so on. In fact, you don't even have to use the Google play store to install them because you can install arbitrary APKs.

In iOS there's no chance of installing an alternate app store by default, and yet with Anroid Amazon was able to make the Kindle devices (fire phone; tablet) that run Android without any hint of Google services.

A user can already choose to purchase a device without those services, it just happens users don't want to. I, as a user, enjoy having Google's services and enjoy that I can install alternatives if I so desire (like alternate and better email apps).

That's one of the reasons I don't use iOS

> Android would be "impaired" if it shipped a general-purpose mail client rather than one designed specifically for Gmail?

Android includes (or at least used to include) a generic email app called Email.

> It would be "impaired" if part of the setup process was to select an app store[0], a browser[1], and a maps app[1]?

You can have all of those, and more, with custom ROMs like Cyanogenmod, or even with AOSP alone.

Phone and tablet manufacturers and retailers do with Android whatever they want, by virtue of it being free and open source. If they thought there was any value (greater than the UX harm) in those measures you propose, they'll do it without blinking. They already modify the hell out of any device that's not a Nexus.

If that were the case, there wouldn't be a problem. But it isn't. Google requires phone makers to comply with a stringent set of 'compatibility' guidelines in order to license any of their closed-source apps. See http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...

It is the case.

Amazon's devices do not have any of Google's services.

However, it's fine... Google isn't doing it for anti-competitive reasons, they're doing it because all of the Google services are needed to have a stable system.

Various custom roms let you install only a subset of the Google services, and that option invariably leads to bugs. Of course Google shouldn't want to support that.

Your complaint is akin to saying that firefox is anti-competitive because to use their XUL interpreter I have to use their mozilla compiler and rendering suite.

There's plenty of freedom already on Android. Plenty of third-party manufacturers bundle their own app stores and users can create and/or install plenty of alternatives.

This is an entirely different story than on iOS.

As it happens, I don't actually believe that Google is being anticompetitive here, I think their actions are pretty reasonable, especially compared to Apple.

But that doesn't mean that every argument that leads to that conclusion must be valid! The statement I was replying to was not. Amazon devices prove the point: as they don't comply with Google's requirements, they are unable to ship any of the Google's proprietary services even as part of the process antsar was suggesting in the GP comment ("part of the setup process [could be] to select an app store" [from a selection including the play store]).

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